Piracy supersite ThePirateBay.org has a reputation for staying a
step ahead of the law, proudly defying media titans and shouting a
litany of legal triumphs to anyone who’d listen. This week,
however, it appears that The Pirate Bay’s past may
just catch up with it, as Swedish prosecutors announced late last
week that they will file formal charges against The Pirate Bay’s
administrators on January 31.

Rather than attack The Pirate Bay itself, Swedish authorities
accused the site’s administrators of accessory and conspiracy to
break copyright law – charges that carry fines at best and a couple
years in prison at worst. While an exact list of the individuals to
be charged was not released, it is expected that such a list contains
The Pirate Bay’s public faces – Peter “brokep” Sunde,
Gottfrid “anakata” Svartholm, and Fredrik “TiAMO” Neij, as
well as Swedish neo-fascist Carl Lundström, who hosted the site
via his company, Rix Telecom.

Swedish prosecutor Håkan Roswall seems confident that The
Pirate Bay’s organizers can be brought to justice, calling the case
a “classic example of accessory – to act as intermediary between
people who commit crimes, whether it’s in the physical or the
virtual world.”

“It's not merely a search engine. It's an active part of an
action that aims at, and also leads to, making copyright protected
material available,” said Roswall.

Sunde seems to think otherwise, noting that The Pirate Bay does
doesn’t host any infringing data and that he and his colleagues
can’t be held responsible for the limited data that the site does
provide. In an interview with Reuters, Sunde called the
accusations “idiotic,” and claimed that Swedish authorities had
“no legal ground” for the accessory charges to be pressed against
him.

The Pirate Bay was knocked offline briefly in 2006 when Swedish
police raided
the site’s datacenter, then located in Stockholm. While it was
expected that the raid – which resulted in the confiscation of at
least 180 servers – would yield voluminous amounts of evidence, a
May 2007 leak revealed that Swedish police had a hard
time finding anything useful. At the time, Sunde claimed an
informant told him that Swedish police had exactly
nothing to pursue charges with, and yet continued to press on
anyway. Now, it appears that the raid wasn’t a complete wash, as
the accessory charges are based in part from evidence gleamed from
the 2006 raid.

Still, The Pirate Bay is confident that it will withstand whatever
legal threats, charges, and convictions are thrown its way: the
site’s infrastructure is spread across the globe, and done in such
a way that not even Sunde, Svartholm, and Neij know where everything
is. “Because the infrastructure is scattered among several places
around the world,” said Roswall, “no separate country will be
able to stop the site.”